How does this CASE expression reach the ELSE claus

Question

I need to load some test data into the Channel field on my Account table. The Channel can be one of 10 different values, so I thought I'd randomly assign the Channel one of the values using a CASE expression along with ABS(CHECKSUM(NewId())) % 10 like so:

SELECT 
    id,
    name,
    Channel = 
      CASE ABS(CHECKSUM(NewId())) % 10
        WHEN 0 THEN 'Baby Only'
        WHEN 1 THEN 'Club'
        WHEN 2 THEN 'Drug'
        WHEN 3 THEN 'Food'
        WHEN 4 THEN 'Internet'
        WHEN 5 THEN 'Liquidators'
        WHEN 6 THEN 'Mass'
        WHEN 7 THEN 'Military'
        WHEN 8 THEN 'Other'
        WHEN 9 THEN 'Speciality'
        ELSE '*NONE*'            -- How is this ever getting reached?
      END
FROM 
    retailshelf_nil...account A

Since I'm using modulo 10 I thought the only possible values should be 0-9. But when I run the above code, I'm finding that the ELSE clause is indeed being reached and that my data is coming up with 'NONE' on some records as shown:

id                  name    Channel
001L000000KpgFqIAJ  Acct1   *NONE*
001L000000KpgFrIAJ  Acct2   Mass
001L000000KpgFsIAJ  Acct3   Club
001L000000KpgFtIAJ  Acct4   *NONE*
001L000000KpgFuIAJ  Acct5   Baby Only
001L000000KpgFvIAJ  Acct6   *NONE*
001L000000KpgFwIAJ  Acct7   Mass

Can someone please explain what logical error I've made that's allowing the ELSE clause to be reached?

When I run a simple test to just generate the random number like so:

SELECT
    RadomNum = ABS(CHECKSUM(NewId())) % 10
FROM 
    retailshelf_nil...account A
ORDER BY 
    1

All the numbers generated are from 0-9 as expected, so what's different about this first SQL?

And is there a workaround to ensure that ELSE is never reached?

Answer 1

A new "random" number will be calculated for every WHEN clause - you can instead use a derived table:

SELECT ID, Name, 
    Channel = 
      CASE Rand
        WHEN 0 THEN 'Baby Only'
        WHEN 1 THEN 'Club'
        WHEN 2 THEN 'Drug'
        WHEN 3 THEN 'Food'
        WHEN 4 THEN 'Internet'
        WHEN 5 THEN 'Liquidators'
        WHEN 6 THEN 'Mass'
        WHEN 7 THEN 'Military'
        WHEN 8 THEN 'Other'
        WHEN 9 THEN 'Speciality'
        ELSE '*NONE*'            -- How is this ever getting reached?
      END
FROM
(   SELECT 
         id,
         name,
         ABS(CHECKSUM(NewId())) % 10 Rand
    FROM   
        retailshelf_nil...account A
) zzz;

or a CROSS APPLY subquery:

SELECT A.ID, A.Name, 
    Channel = 
      CASE zzz.Rand
        WHEN 0 THEN 'Baby Only'
        WHEN 1 THEN 'Club'
        WHEN 2 THEN 'Drug'
        WHEN 3 THEN 'Food'
        WHEN 4 THEN 'Internet'
        WHEN 5 THEN 'Liquidators'
        WHEN 6 THEN 'Mass'
        WHEN 7 THEN 'Military'
        WHEN 8 THEN 'Other'
        WHEN 9 THEN 'Speciality'
        ELSE '*NONE*'            -- How is this ever getting reached?
      END
FROM
    retailshelf_nil...account A
CROSS APPLY
(   SELECT 
        ABS(CHECKSUM(NewId())) % 10
) zzz (Rand);

That way NewID() is called only once per record.

A similar scneario was resolved here.

The T-SQL documentation explains this phenomenon (granted it's for Sybase but apparently still applies to SQL Server):

Expressions that reference the rand function, the getdate function, and so on, produce different values each time they are evaluated. This can yield unexpected results when you use these expressions in certain case expressions. For example, the SQL standard specifies that case expressions with the form:

case expression
    when value1 then result1
    when value2 then result2
    when value3 then result3
...
end

are equivalent to the following form of case expression:

case expression
    when expression=value1 then result1
    when expression=value2 then result2
    when expression=value3 then result3
...
end

Answer 2

The written form of the query is expanded to:

Channel = 
      CASE
        WHEN ABS(CHECKSUM(NewId())) % 10 = 0 THEN 'Baby Only'
        WHEN ABS(CHECKSUM(NewId())) % 10 = 1 THEN 'Club'
        WHEN ABS(CHECKSUM(NewId())) % 10 = 2 THEN 'Drug'
        WHEN ABS(CHECKSUM(NewId())) % 10 = 3 THEN 'Food'
        WHEN ABS(CHECKSUM(NewId())) % 10 = 4 THEN 'Internet'
        WHEN ABS(CHECKSUM(NewId())) % 10 = 5 THEN 'Liquidators'
        WHEN ABS(CHECKSUM(NewId())) % 10 = 6 THEN 'Mass'
        WHEN ABS(CHECKSUM(NewId())) % 10 = 7 THEN 'Military'
        WHEN ABS(CHECKSUM(NewId())) % 10 = 8 THEN 'Other'
        WHEN ABS(CHECKSUM(NewId())) % 10 = 9 THEN 'Speciality'
        ELSE '*NONE*'            -- How is this ever getting reached?
      END

A new value for NEWID is used in each test.

Answer 3

Related to second question,

CHECKSUM(NewId()) will return negative results sometimes, which is not match with any of the case conditions. If a negative number is divided with any number the result will be negative. Execute the following query,

declare @v nvarchar(50) = newid()
select CHECKSUM(@v),@v,CHECKSUM(@v) % 10